One can empathise with, if not understand, the whirlwind of sudden stardom that has grabbed Bruce Liu’s life. “I’ve gone from being a student to not having much time at home for a whole year, being constantly on tour,” he admits.  Perhaps no pianist in the world has had the career acceleration and ascension Bruce Liu has had in the last three years. The Montreal-raised artist sprang to fame in 2021 with his win at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and has since garnered over 70 million streams with his debut record Waves (an exploration of French masters from Rameau to Ravel to Alkan) and Young Talent of the Year honours from Opus Klassik. One could also likely empathise with the need to take a break. As it turns out, Liu’s break involved a trip to the Siemens-Villa on the southwestern outskirts of Berlin, far from the halls that an artist of his stature would normally perform in. Here, he settled into a retreat of sorts, a veritable cabin in the woods to explore Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons. 

The piano cycle rings authentically in this 300-seat hall—“a little corner of peaceful bliss”, as Pushkin said in his poem, “By the Hearth: January”. This poem was the first in a series of monthly publications in the St. Petersburg journal Nuvellist, for which The Seasons was commissioned to accompany the 12-month collection. The Seasons opens with “January: At the Fireside”, a demonstration of Tchaikovsky’s heightened emotional poetics with a piano theme in the middle that would later feature in the poet Lensky’s aria in the second act of Eugene Onegin. In the case of Onegin, the tortured poet shivers alone at dawn, contemplating the decisions that led him to face down his own death. In “January”, the poet has no decisions to make; he can just exist in his refuge. The music is therefore unharried and unencumbered. 

Heightened excitement and bright sounds combine in Liu’s playing as we journey into “February: Carnival” a wintery street scene that could easily provide the soundtrack to a weekend on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa or a jaunt through St. Boniface to Winnipeg’s Festival du Voyageur. Liu feels more comfortable in this movement than the last, as though he is more accustomed to an allegro giusto life than a moderato semplice. Despite the quickening pace, “ Carnival” retains an organic feel that can be explained simply by Newton’s Third Law: a body in (e)motion tends to stay in (e)motion.

March and April both arrive with the cautious optimism that is borne of time spent alone with one’s emotions, cocooned from outside influence. Perhaps, you think, you’ve slowed the emotional roll, and you’re able to march out into the blue abyss that Apollon Maykov describes in the companion poetry, and feel the “first dreams of another happiness” as you exercise the last of your big emotions. In Tchaikovsky's “March: Song of the Lark”, we hear the tears that live in Maykov’s “Snowdrop: April” constantly dropping like the melting snow falling off of the roof. Liu’s keyboard echoes the lark song’s optimism, pouring out a fluent and luminous melody that William Blake and John Keats ascribed to that famous bird just over half a century earlier. 

“May: White Nights” responds with a G major bloom in the keys as spring arrives in earnest. It’s a season that Tchaikovsky wants everyone to access, regardless of their skill at the piano. In fact these pieces were deliberately constructed with the amateur pianist in mind, and that quality is most apparent in “May”. It’s the sort of piece that a superstar, made famous by Chopin, would play to test the action and sonority of an instrument. The “June: Barcarolle” that follows—also in G major—is also a peaceful month that anyone can achieve. It’s less the overbearing joy that comes with prom graduation and June weddings and more an evening on the back porch or balcony, the mercury on the thermometer barely cracking 20 degrees with a breeze warding off the humidity, rustling the buds that May nurtured. 

This is the moment in the album where a professional makes the amateur-intended score shine. Liu finds Tchaikovsky’s emotion in his simplicity. He illustrates the whole point of this recording in “May”, “June” and in “July: The Reaper’s Song”─that confluence of resting while keeping pace, virtuosity without pressure. 

All too soon, “August: The Harvest” and “September: The Hunt” arrive, and with it, the sounds of responsibility. The harvest must be collected, the concert seasons begin in earnest. The music becomes exciting, but also impetuous, as though the performer can sense the overwhelming emotions that will surely arrive. Even the calm sections have lost their lustre in a cloud of crop dust swatted from overalls or concert tails. The transition into fall truly arrives in “September”, with D octaves in the keys that Liu plays to announce his own arrival on stage. The hall sings the most at this moment, but it doesn’t sing for long. 

The “October: Autumn Song” arrives with a windy swirl of Alekey Tolstoy’s yellow leaves “flying in the wind, falling on our poor orchard.” The work foreshadows the chill that is about to take hold and, as a result, is the movement that feels the most unwieldy. This musical moment feels like the action that requires Newton’s concept of equal and opposite reactions: the need to get back to that place of reprieve.

The final pieces in the series evoke the act of escape and the arrival back at the beginning of the cycle. Tchaikovsky places us “On the Troika” of Nekrasov to take us to December. Liu almost can’t wait to get us back to the feelings that we found him in back in January, but when we get there, it’s like we never left. The final selection on the record—the Romance, op. 5 added as an encore—feels like reading your diary on New Year’s Eve, reviewing the year that was in all of its turmoil, from the mundane moments you could rest in to the times you had to give everything you had. On this record, Liu handles all of these moments with a professional, sensitive touch that is made all the more impressive given the electric turmoil that has been his last three years.